when snakes come out to play
by The Periodic Table of Converse
Summary: The voices in her heart are screaming for her to think. The voices in her head are yelling for her to shoot. Her teeth are clenched, her skin is slicked with perspiration, her hands are shaking, but Toni Stark isn't dropping the gun. At least she isn't pulling the trigger either. [rule63!tony, stony if you squint, rated t] TITLE A REFERENCE TO ALICE WALKER'S "THE FLOWERS"


_**It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.**_

**Mark Twain**

**ooo**

Toni Stark stares down the polished, oiled, _deadly_ black barrel of a Stark Industries customized handgun. Her forehead is uncharacteristically moist. Beads of salt slowly, ever-so-gently, traipse down her temples and drip from the tips of her hair. Her hands, normally steady and strong and calloused, look weak and tired, brittle bones prominent, peaking out at the world through torn skin and malnourished tissue. They shake a little bit, not enough to throw off the shot, but they're still trembling. Toni's hands don't shake when he's in her element. Toni isn't in her element.

Her eyes are cloudy and distant. Once an intelligent, teasing brown, demoted to a mournful, lonely, hate-filled glare. Her eyes are weak where her limbs are not. Her heart is fighting where her brain is not. Her hands are shaking with the impending knowledge, with the _guilt_ that is sure to follow, with what taking this course of action means. For her. For the team. For the world. For him. Her hands are shaking, but they are not wavering.

They are not dropping the gun, the same as her eyes are not clearing of their dust and clouded appearance, the same as her weakened, tired, electromagnetic-dependent heart is fighting a losing battle to her advanced, intelligent, massive-sized brain.

She had promised once that her heart is faulty. Broken. Unusable. That her best feature, the only thing she has ever figured worth mentioning to anyone, is her brain and her knowledge. Not her ability to care or love, or know which side is the right one to fight for.

Her teeth are clenched, her skin is slicked with perspiration, her hands are shaking, but Toni Stark isn't dropping the gun.

"You are not real," she says, and her voice hisses, slithering across the floors and creeping down her ears and coiling around her brain. She knows what she is saying. **She knows he is real. She knows he is here to help her. Save her. She knows that if she shoots him, he will die.** She also knows that if her façade, her exterior belief that this situation is under control, that she isn't weighing the worth of her life to another's, cracks even a fraction, he will kill her. _If she wavers, if Toni drops her aim, drops the only thing pinning him to the concrete wall of the chamber, she will die._

His voice is soft and gentle, and Toni tries to pretend the sound doesn't tear at her very being. _He is corrupt._ **But he is good.** "Toni." She catches the taste of a drop of blood on her tongue. Her teeth have torn into the flesh in her mouth. "Let me help you." He goes to reach a hand, big and soft, still stained with charcoal and flecked with red ink, around the gun, towards her face. She stares at it. Where do the paint splatters end and her blood spots begin?

Her only response is the sound of the bullet being cocked. He freezes. She levels the barrel in-between his eyes. Points it right there, at the bridge of his nose, where a vacant memory of her lips against his brow tugs at her soul. **He had been hurt. Badly. She had been worried. Very. ** _Except Toni Stark doesn't feel worry._

_Antonia Edeline Stark does not feel anything. Not a damn thing._

"Toni." His hands don't shake like hers do, but his voice is vibrating through her skull. "Please." His eyes look wet and his breath shakes.

There's a sob building in her throat, fighting at her poisoned brain, crying desperately for her attention. **Yelling, telling her to stop and think. Demanding to know what happened to her morals while she was sitting alone in a concrete cell, clutching at her head.** Trying to pry the headset off. She shakes, but her gun is steady. "No," she says, but she can't tell who she's refusing, whether it be him or herself or the orders in her frazzled brain or the soothing words desperately trying to melt her ice cold heart. The voices in her brain are telling her to pull the trigger. _If she doesn't shoot him, he's going to kill her_. And she can't die. It's not something Toni Stark signed up to do. But he offered.

He said he was willing to lay his own life down. She didn't. She never said that. And she wants to go home. To go back to yesterday, where she was drinking water for once, instead of tooth-rottingly sweetened coffee, or scotch. Where he was reading the newspaper at the table, and a scientist was eating cereal and eggs and toast. Where there was a man, kind of short and spiky, spilling orange juice accidentally on a redheaded woman's lap.

_She doesn't know these people._

**But she feels like she should.**

Her heart pounds against glass and metal and bright blue light. A triangle pulses on the tattered thin grey fabric of her shirt. A triangle isn't a half circle, but the shape makes her think of an arc. And the way a patriotic, red white and blue disk streaks away through the air at deadly speeds, only to arc back into his gloved and waiting hands. The voices in her heart are screaming for her to think harder, because **she's almost there, she's on the verge, the edge of the void. Keep going, Toni, because you've almost got it!** The voices in her head are yelling for her to _shoot without mercy_.

The voices in her head and cold and angry and sharp. She can feel their sharp knuckled fists slamming into her face if she disobeys. The voices in her heart are nice and comforting. Familiar, a source of warmth. People she must have trusted once. It's pain against love, fear against hope. Which is stronger?

_Pain?_

**Love?**

_Fear._

**Hope.**

_THE VOICES IN HER HEAD._

**THE VOICES IN HER HEART.**

Who does she block out? Who does she fight, where does she succumb? Why is she here, pointing a gun that looks vaguely familiar at a more familiar and very beautiful man who is looking back at her with kindred blue eyes and tears on his face?

Why isn't he dying?

_Shoot!_

**Don't shoot!**

Her teeth are still clenched, her skin is still slicked with perspiration, her hands are still shaking, but Toni Stark still isn't dropping the gun.

She still isn't pulling the trigger either.

And she still doesn't know what to do.

Fin.

a/n: so it's been a while… sorry bout that. I miss you guys and I miss writing, but I'm super busy and will be for quite a while. I do however, feel very guilty about leaving you guys hanging for so long, and so after digging around in the dozen plot bunnies I have on my desktop, I unearthed this little number. Which I really like. It's dark, twisted, and it came out better than I thought it would. So I brushed it off, polished it up, and slapped a title on it. please enjoy!


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